


a thousand dreams i’m holding heavy

by dankaroo



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: A little bit of angst, F/F, Krypton, an even littler bit of smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 16:35:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14169039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dankaroo/pseuds/dankaroo
Summary: Or, Earth is different than Krypton, and Kara isn’t sure how she feels about it sometimes.Mostly a Kara Danvers character study, with a focus on her feelings about Krypton.Supercorp & a bit of Agent Reign





	a thousand dreams i’m holding heavy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ratherembarrassing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratherembarrassing/gifts).



> Happy (belated) birthday to Ashleigh, my lovely Australian friend! This one’s for you :-)
> 
> Call it a fast-forward through season 3, where somehow Sam is able to stay & everyone lives happily ever after.
> 
> I took some liberties with Kryptonian traditions. I’m not a comic book reader, but I sure love me some headcanons.
> 
> Apologies for any mistakes, I wrote this entirely in my notes app & posted from mobile.

 

The thing about Earth is that none of the traditions make any sort of sense.

Krypton has— had— holidays. Things on Earth are just... different.

(Like that time Kara was told her cousin was going to have a baby, and they all needed to go to the Shower. Eliza had explained to Kara that it was just the name for a party to celebrate a baby coming.

The concept of a baby shower was bizarre at best and frightening at worst. A large gathering of people crowding around someone who wasn’t even born yet is kind of, well, stupid. Shouldn’t everyone celebrate after it was born? On Krypton, family would come by to meet a new baby, but it seemed like so much effort to put together a welcoming party every single time someone was about to be born.

Not to mention that so many other people brought _their_ babies to these parties.

It was dumb to call them showers, Kara had decided. These parties were loud and stinky and exhausting. A shower should be quiet and clean and relaxing.)

There is— was— a gift-giving celebration at the start of a new year, sort of like if Earth’s Christmas and New Year’s were smushed into one thing. They also had birthdays, but they didn’t really have bat miztvahs or quinceñeras or sweet sixteens or any kind of milestone birthdays.

So, why pretty much the entire planet celebrates some guy Jesus’ birthday, Kara doesn’t understand. It wasn’t even his real birthday, she had learned later; a bunch of people that ran these places called Churches decided to steal some other people’s holiday like a thousand years ago because they wanted more people to join them, or something. Human history wasn’t always logical. And it definitely wasn’t accurate.

So, how the heck Santa Claus even fits into the picture is beyond her level of reasoning. Kara did the math. It’s impossible for a human to travel at the velocity required for him to visit every single Christian house in the world in one night, even if he used timezones to his advantage by starting in Australia. His bones would crumble to dust. Literally.

Which means, Kara deduces, that he must be alien.

And he must be a Martian if he can read minds and fly. But he supposedly has a sleigh, so that rules that out, and...

Or, Rao, what if he’s a Xenusian? They arrive on planets and then they wipe out the entire populous of the world in one fell swoop. Kara does some quick calculations of how long it would take a scout on Earth to call in reinforcements from that solar system, and—

First she lost Krypton, and now she’s going to lose this dumb planet, too.

“Eliza,” Kara says. She’s wringing her hands, unsure how to break the news that Earth is likely going to be conquered by Xenusians within the next hundred years.

Eliza stops drying the mug in her hand, places it on the countertop, and faces her newly adopted daughter. “Kara, is everything okay?”

“No,” Kara takes a deep breath. “We’re all going to die.”

Eliza’s lips pull into a thin line. “How do you know that, dear?”

The night Kara learns about human religion and mythology, she pours herself into the stories of Hades and Aries and Venus and Aphrodite from the books Eliza checked out of the library for her.

“Sea God, Stars God, Sun God,” her finger stops on those words and press into the page. “‘Helios’!”

She beams.

If Earth knows of Rao, too, maybe she’s okay with living here. Even if they call him by the wrong name.

—

The thing about Earth is that if you want relationships, you have to make them yourself.

(When she first lives with the Danvers family, functioning in a human relationship feels clumsy and awkward, and Kara uses the wrong words sometimes to describe how she’s feeling, or she uses language too elevated for the people her age to understand, or if she says how she’s actually feeling, people sometimes get upset at her, and sometimes there is no English word for how she’s feeling, but there are about twelve Kryptonian ones she can think of immediately, and why can’t they have houses and guilds and prearranged relationships here? It makes so much more sense when the guesswork is taken out of it.

Eliza and Jeremiah try to be welcoming, but they’re not her parents.

Kara wants her mother.

Eliza is kind and sweet and softspoken, but she is not Alura In-Ze, mother of Kara Zor-El. Jeremiah gives her glasses that help her focus her senses, and her world quiets down a little bit. She stops getting headaches from the persistent changes in vision, and she learns how to tune out the deafening white noise. So that’s something.)

Alex is the best sister she could have ever found.

(Alex is mean, but only at first:

“I want the soft shirt, this one itches.” They’re standing in their shared space, facing each other from opposite sides of the room. Alex’s fists clench. Kara tightens her jaw.

“Well that’s too bad,” Alex tuts, “that shirt’s mine and you can’t wear it.”

“But—”

“I said it’s mine. If you want it so bad, ask my mom to get you one for your birthday, or something.”

Kara snaps her mouth shut. She looks down at her hands, and manages a small, “I don’t know when that is, here.”

Alex stares at Kara, who swallows the lump in her throat and blinks back burning tears.

It’s been 365 days since Kara’s arrived on Earth, and Alex has been annoyed at her new roommate every single one of them.

But to not know when your own birthday is...

“Hey, I— okay. Just today. You can wear it, but just today. Okay?”

Kara nods, and Alex walks over to her and puts a tentative arm around Kara’s shoulders. Kara breathes in a shuddering breath and Alex bites the inside of her cheek.

“Actually, you know what? You should keep it.”

Alex reaches over with her free hand to poke the crinkle between Kara’s eyebrows.

“For your Earth birthday.”

Kara is quiet for a moment, then leans her head on her sister’s shoulder.)

Kara would die for Alex Danvers, but Alex would kill for Kara.

And, at this rate, Alex might kill for Sam and Ruby Arias, too.

Sam and Alex are two sides of the same coin: the tough but tender and the soft but strong. Not really opposites so much as complements.

They make sense.

Kara has never seen Alex so happy. They’re a family, the Arias-Danvers clan, the two moms with their teenaged daughter and maybe one day, plans for a baby on the way.

Kara loves that Sam and Ruby slipped right into their lives, like they belonged there from the start. That they can roll with the punches, that they introduced her to pancake o’clock, that they fight for each other, for their friends, for what’s right. For their happiness, and for Alex’s.

And then there’s Lena. Lena, who is beautiful and brave and strong.

Lena, who is lying in Kara’s bed at this very moment in time, half on top of Kara, half tucked underneath a mountain of pillows.

Lena, who snores just the slightest bit in her sleep but will never know that about herself because Kara doesn’t want her to be embarrassed and find a way to make it stop.

Lena, who listens to each and every story Kara tells about Krypton, no matter how many times she’s heard it before. Who asks questions that stretch the far reaches of Kara’s memory, who helps her remember some of the little things she’s forgotten she forgot.

Lena, who understands the pang in her chest when she thinks of having people that love her unconditionally but losing the people that were supposed to love her forever. Because Lena gets it, too, and she somehow cleared the cobwebs from Kara’s heart and made a home in it like it was the easiest thing in the Universe.

Kara knows they belong together.

If Sam and Alex are two sides of the same coin, Lena and Kara are two hands on the same body. Each can function on their own, completely separate from the other, but work better together for most things. Anticipating the other’s moves, providing just the right amount of stability without overcompensating, splitting the heavy loads. Carrying the baggage, together.

—

The thing about Earth is that the food is _amazing_.

Maybe it’s because her sense of taste has enhanced exponentially since her arrival, but Rao help her, Kara loves the taste of food.

And good thing, too, because she spends most of her waking hours either eating or thinking about what she’s going to eat next.

On Krypton, food was for sustenance, and only that — which made sense, at the time, but donuts exist and Kara cares exactly none percent that they contain no nutritional value.

Despite being practical and an efficient way to energize, Kryptonian food was actually pretty delicious. That it was doled out in individual portions only makes Kara appreciate it that much more that she can go pick up three dozen pizzas and a two-Liter bottle of soda for just herself any time she could conceivably want.

Which she does on a fairly regular basis, which happens to be the main target for Lena’s teasing.

(The first time she and Lena Luthor have lunch, Lena voluntarily orders a Cobb salad — “no cheese and no dressing, please” — and Kara just about loses her mind.

“It’s healthy, Kara, bodies need sustenance. An entire basket of garlic bread may taste delicious now, but won’t you feel like garbage later?”

“I don’t know, Lena. Taste is pretty important when it comes to food, and I can’t imagine you’d actually prefer _that_ over _this_ ,” Kara shrugs, and picks up another piece of bread with a cheeky smile.)

Kara knows she’s lucky that she can have as much of any kind of food as she wants. She thinks about how she would never know the beauty of consuming large quantities of potstickers while sitting on her couch in pajamas if she had never come to Earth. In fact, that’s all she can think about while flying home tonight from the DEO after a particularly active fight.

For a split second she thinks, “worth it,” then regrets it terribly, doesn’t let the thought sit for another moment, and picks the phone out of her Supergirl boot so she can order some takeout. She cups her hand over the speaker to block out the wind.

—

The thing about Krypton is that she’s starting to forget the little things: how her bedroom smelled, and the Kryptonian word for “the anger that comes along with stubbing your toe on the corner of a table”, and Aunt Astra’s favorite color.

She hates that she sees Krypton through rose colored glasses, because after all she’s learned about it (like her own parents’ shortcomings, for Rao’s sake), she knows it wasn’t perfect, but it feels like betrayal to think of it in any other way. She hates that she’s the only one to remember it at all, and that how she remembers it might not be how it actually was. She hates that her home planet, gone forever and likely to be forgotten entirely in a few hundred years, is starting to slip away from her.

She’s learning how Lena’s hair smells after a shower, and that umami is the word for “the savory, meaty flavor of potstickers”, and Sam’s favorite pancake toppings are bananas and walnuts with whipped cream.

It’ll never be okay, she decides. It’s not okay if she forgets the little things about Krypton, but as long as she remembers the important ones, that’s all she can hope for.

She has to make some room for the little things about Earth, too.

—

The thing about Krypton is that she could have never physically felt so intensely as she does on Earth.

If she thinks about it, Kara can feel every hair on her head as it sways in the wind as she’s flying, hear her sister’s heartbeat from across the city, smell the croissants from her favorite bakery in Midvale.

Feel each ridge of Lena’s fingerprints as she touches her, slowly dragging her fingertips from Kara’s knees to her hips. Every crease in Lena’s lips as they kiss their way from Kara’s bellybutton to her sternum to the underside of her breast to her collarbone to the corner of where her jaw meets her neck, and back again.

Kara can feel Lena’s heartbeat through her left wrist as it rests low against Kara’s hips, meant to hold her in place while Lena’s right hand traces invisible patterns on the inside of Kara’s thigh, then the crease of her leg, then inside her.

Kara feels every drop of moisture in Lena’s breath as she exhales between placing kisses on all those same places, over and over again.

And, oh, if Lena’s hands were sent to Kara by some benevolent gods above, then her tongue must have been sent by Rao himself.

—

The thing about Krypton is that she thinks about it every single day, has missed it every single day since her parents sent her away so many years ago. The brilliant colors and the bustle of the busy city and the comfort of her parents’ presence are tucked neatly in the back of her mind, saved for a day when Earth is too hard to bear and she needs something familiar to get by until she can put on a brave face for the world again.

Today is one of those days, and Kara is lying on her back in bed, glasses discarded on her nightstand.

It feels almost like a dream, thinking about being back there. Like it’s some made up place she saw in a movie or some remote civilization she read about in Jeremiah’s old National Geographic magazines. She can picture it now, her and Alex in their shared room, magazines scattered around them. Turning the page of the one they’re reading together, and seeing the view from her bedroom window back on Krypton printed in richly colored ink across a two-page spread.

Except she’s looking out her bedroom window of her apartment in National City, and there are gauzy curtains billowing in the breeze coming through her open window, and it’s a beautiful day with a clear, cloudless blue sky.

The thing about Krypton is that it exists only in Kara’s memory, and she can never go back.

She doesn’t dwell on it, this time; instead, she thinks about her sister, her family, the people she’s saved—

The thing about Earth is that every once in a while, it feels a little bit like home.

She runs her fingers through the length of Lena’s hair, and looks down to watch as she sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me at dankaroo-writes on tumblr!


End file.
